I said, “Good morning, Teach.”
“Hi.” Her smile was cautious. She drew the robe tighter. The few square inches of chest I could see were white dusted with a flush. I went behind her and kissed the back of her neck. Her skin smelled of lotion. She pressed her head back against my belly and rolled it back and forth. I touched her cheek, sat down.
She said, “What can I get you?”
“Just juice. I’ll get it myself.”
“Here, take mine.” She handed me the glass. I drank.
She said, “So.”
“So.”
I looked toward the kitchen. “I notice your blackboard is blank. Any plans for today?”
She shook her head, looked preoccupied.
“Something the matter?”
Another shake of her head.
“What is it, Linda?”
“Nothing. Everything’s fine.” Wide smile.
“Okay.” I drank juice.
She got up and began straightening a living room that didn’t need it. Her hair hung down her back, flapping in a wet sheet against black silk. Her feet were bare, narrow, with curving toes, the nails polished pink, though her fingernails were unpainted.
Secret vanity. A woman who valued privacy.
I went to her and slipped my arms around her. She didn’t resist but neither did she yield.
I said, “I know. So much so fast.”
She gave a short, angry laugh. “For a long, long time I’ve pretended I had no needs. Now you come along and all of a sudden I’m a bundle of needs. It feels too much like weakness.”
“I know exactly what you mean. It’s been a long time for me too.”
She turned around sharply, searched my face, prospecting for lies. “Has it?”
“Yes.”
She stared some more, then grabbed my face with both of her hands and kissed me so hard I felt myself spinning.
When we broke, she said, “Oh, Lord, the danger signs are all flashing.” But she took my right hand and pressed it to her left breast, over the heartbeat.
Afterward, she ran a bath for me, kneeled on the mat and scrubbed my back with a loofah. Too subservient for my taste but she insisted. After a minute or so I said, “Why don’t you get in?”
“Nope.” She touched her still-wet hair. “I’m already waterlogged.”
She kept scrubbing. I closed my eyes. She began humming, something in a major key. I realized her voice was something special- sweet, with a controlled resonance. Trained pipes. I listened more intently. She hummed louder.
When she paused, I said, “You’ve got a really great voice.”
“Oh, yeah, a regular diva.”
I opened my eyes. She looked cross.
“Ever sing professionally?”
“Oh, sure- the Met, Carnegie Hall, sold out the Super- dome. But the pull of the classroom was too darned strong. Hand me the shampoo.”
The strain in her voice let me know I’d touched another nerve. How many danger zones along the pathway to knowing her? Tired of backing away, I said, “How long ago was it?”
“Ancient history.”
“Couldn’t be too ancient.”
“College days. That’s ancient enough.”
“I played music in college too.”
“That right?”
“Played guitar at nights, to put myself through.”
“Guitar.” Her mouth turned down. “How nice.”
The chill.
I said, “Another danger zone, Linda?”
“What… what are you talking about?”
“When I get near certain topics- cops, now music- the No Trespassing signs start flashing.”
“Don’t be silly.” She pointed toward the shampoo bottle. “Do you want me to do your hair or not?”
I gave her the bottle. She lathered. When she was through she handed me a towel and left the bathroom.
I toweled off, dressed, and went into the bedroom. She was sitting at her vanity, putting on eye shadow. Looking miserable.
I said, “Sorry. Forget it.”
She began combing her hair. “The cop’s name was Armando Bonilla. Mondo. San Antonio PD, rookie in a squad car. I was just twenty when I met him, a junior at U.T. He was twenty-two, an orphan. Old Mexican family, but he barely spoke Spanish. One of those Latin cowboy types you see in Texas. He wore his hair longer than the Department liked, spent his nights playing in a band. Guitar.” She shook her head. “Good old guitar. Must be in my karma, huh?”
Her laugh was bitter.
“Six-string guitar and pedal steel. Flying fingers, self-taught- he was a natural. The other three guys in the band were cops too. More Latin cowboys. They’d known each other since sixth grade, joined the Department to have something stable, but the band was their first love. Magnum Four. Fantasies of recording contracts but none of them was ambitious or aggressive enough to pursue it and they never got out of the bar circuit. It’s how I met them… met him. Amateur night at a place near the Alamo; they were the house band. Daddy was a Sunday fiddler, used to push music on me all the time. Push me to sing. Traditional country, western swing- the stuff he liked. I knew every Bob Wills song note for note by the time I was eight.
“That night he dragged me there, then made me get up and sing. Patsy Cline. ‘I Fall to Pieces.’ I was so nervous, my voice cracked. I sounded horrible. But the competition was thin and I came in first- gift certificate for a pair of boots and an invitation to join the band. They were into country rock- Eagles, Rodney Crowell, old Buddy Holly stuff. Mondo did a mean ‘ La Bamba,’ putting on this humongous gag sombrero and this thick Spanish accent, even though he didn’t know what all the words meant.
“They renamed the band Magnum Four and Lady Derringer. I started to get into performing. You would have thought Daddy’d be overjoyed- music plus a bunch of cops. But he didn’t like the fact that they were Mexican- though he never would come out and admit it. In San Antonio the big myth is that brown and white live together in harmony, but that ain’t the way it goes down when tongues loosen at the dinner table. So instead of just coming out and saying it, he griped about the kind of garbage we were playing, how late I was coming home from gigs, stinking of booze and smoke. Mondo tried to relate to him on a cop level- Daddy’d worked in the same Department, made sergeant before getting accepted into the Rangers. But that didn’t make any difference. He cold-shouldered Mondo. Told me the guys were no-account punks masquerading as peace officers, nothing like the upstanding buckaroos of his day. The thing that made him maddest was that he’d gotten me into it in the first place. The more he bugged me, the more resolute I got. Closer to Mondo, who was really sweet and naïve beneath all the macho posturing. Finally, Daddy and I had a big fight- he slapped me across the face and I packed up and moved out of the house and into an apartment with Mondo and two of the band guys. Dad stopped speaking to me, total divorce. A month later- just after Christmas- Mondo and I got engaged.”
She stopped, bit her lip, got up, and walked back and forth in front of the bed.
“About a month after the engagement, he got pulled out of uniform and put on some kind of undercover assignment that he couldn’t talk about. I assumed it was Dope or Vice, or maybe some Internal Affairs thing, but whatever it was, it changed our lives. He’d work nights, sleep days, be gone for a week at a time. The band fell apart. Without him it was nothing. I used the extra time to study, but the other guys got depressed, started drinking more- bad vibes. Mondo started drinking too. And smoking dope, which was something he’d never done before. He grew his hair even longer, stopped shaving, wore ratty clothes, didn’t shower regularly- as if the criminal thing were rubbing off on him. When I ragged him about it, he said it was part of the job- he was just playing a role. But I could tell he was really getting into it, and I wondered if things would ever go back to the way they’d been.